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Jan. 18, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:42
604 Agnosticism Part 3 - Walking to India

Why walk when you can just call? Because...

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Good afternoon, everybody.
It's Steph. Hope you're doing well.
It is just a little bit before 2 o'clock on the 18th of January, 2006.
And I thought it might be worth, since we haven't chatted about agnosticism in a little while, though I know we've been a little religious heavy of late, but I think there's good reasons for that, and I hope that you find them good too.
But the post was put on the board.
There we go. Which went something like this.
After having listened to a pair of earlier podcasts, that is, 502 and 511, regarding the irrationality of agnosticism, I was left with some questions as to the reasoning behind the invalidation of the assertions of the philosophy.
As I am, for the most part, atheistic, I agree with the essence of the claims that were made.
That agnosticism is of fruitlessness, of pointlessness, and of cowardice is fair enough in most cases.
That God is, if unprovable, that he is also non-existent for all intents and purposes.
However, it was alleged that agnostics attempt to compare the unknown universe X, wherein God may or may not exist.
Also, that this was inherently a null comparison due to the irrationality of comparing something to the intangible or unknown.
But it's not this...
But is... This not the point of the agnostic credo?
That is, is it not this null comparison, this inability to compare, the null or unknown, that proves that to assert something does or does not exist is dogmatic?
So, I certainly do understand, and somebody else, Greg wrote back very wisely, I think, there are two different degrees of atheism being intertwined here.
The first is the justified disbelief in God, As defined by Western theologians, the second is the positive assertion that God cannot and does not exist.
I think both are actually justifiable, but for different reasons.
The first is simply the default position that I'm under no obligation to believe someone's claims of the existence of God until they can be demonstrated convincingly according to the rules of evidence at hand, logic and empiricism.
If I were obligated to believe every claim about the unknown until it could be disproven, then our school textbooks would be filled with, quote, truths about all sorts of unknown things, unreachable worlds, and alternate spatial dimensions.
These are The folks that say there's no good reason to believe this claim is true, and they would be right.
The second argument, while not justifiable on experiential grounds for precisely your objection, is justifiable on logical grounds.
The God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and indeed most gods, could not possibly have existed because the definition is utterly incoherent.
So we need not even address the further problem of evidence.
And the gentleman who first wrote, and I fully appreciate and I think understand where he's coming from, Is cautious, and wisely so, I think, is cautious in saying something like, God does not exist.
Because such positive claims make many people, and for many reasons, somewhat uneasy.
And you can hear this kind of stuff.
My mother used to talk about this in terms of psychic phenomenon, right?
So she would say, she probably still does, I guess.
But she would say, ah, if you told people 80 years ago that Everybody would be able to talk around the world, and hear each other, that they would never believe you.
And similarly, in a few decades, when psychic phenomenon approved, people won't believe you.
So what she did was, and this is not uncommon among people who have a mystical bent, what she did was she said, well, things that people would find amazing have been developed, and therefore...
Anything which anyone finds amazing is inevitable.
If not possible, probably inevitable.
And that's a pretty self-serving argument to hang on to particular kinds of mystical beliefs.
Because, of course, if you did say to people a hundred years ago that you'd be able to send email and text messages all the way around the world pretty much for free, talk to people, fly to the moon, they'd all say, wow, that's That's almost inconceivable.
But what would be their criteria for accepting that this would be possible?
Well, of course, if you went back to a 19th century physicist and you said, here's how it works, you know, copper wires transmitting and all this, you could even go into computers and TCPF and so on, then they'd say, well, okay, that's within the bounds of reality, that makes sense.
And of course that would be one of the criteria for knowing that somebody was in fact coming from the future and telling you all these things that were going to occur down the road.
So if I go back to the 19th century with my relatively paltry knowledge of communications and said, well, it works kind of like this and here's how this works and here's how that works, there would be enough knowledge even that I would have that would make people go, well, that's something we haven't really thought of There are lights and they work with this and there's communication and it works like that, electrical impulses along copper wire, I guess fiber optics now.
There would be enough vaguely credible stuff there that you would say, wow, that's pretty cool.
So you go back to the Middle Ages and you say to someone, there's going to be instant on lights that will burn for hundreds or thousands of hours with requiring no flame and no wood, no fire.
I'd be like, whoa, really?
How does that work? And you say, well, I don't know what it is.
I know that Edison tried hundreds or thousands of combinations, some sort of tungsten thing, or some sort of filament wire that heats and glows without burning out, and so on.
But if I was able to bring a light bulb back, or at least come back with the chemical formula, it could be tested, to some degree, and at least it would be something that people could reason about, they could sort of understand.
However, if I come back, if I do a podcast tomorrow saying, I actually am from the future, as one listener demanded to know of me many moons ago, I am in fact from the future, and I bring tales of Ancapistan back to the hidebound, enslaved, statist world, then people would say, wow, well, tell me what the future's like.
I'd say, well, everyone operates within one giant brain vat.
And psychic phenomenon occur regularly and so on and so on and so on.
Everyone can join their thoughts together in a worldwide wobbly brain or something.
And people would say, well, that's interesting.
And how does that work?
And I'd say, it's magic.
And they might sort of ask, really?
Well, what else happens in this futuristic world of yours?
Oh, well, this magical substance has been found that eliminates all disease.
And it's a commonly occurring substance.
And people would say, well, that's pretty cool.
Perhaps you can tell us what this substance is.
And I say, well, this substance is magic.
Or some such nonsense.
And I'm sure you get the general pattern.
If I were to come back and say, well, all genetic deformities have been eliminated, How have they been eliminated?
Well, people just follow a square circle.
At what point would you find my claim to be from the future and to have lived and to have studied this stuff and to have understood this stuff?
At what point would you become somewhat dubious about me actually having done the Schwarzenegger pile through time and come from the future?
If everything that I responded was incomprehensible from a knowledge standpoint.
When you say something is magic, you're basically saying that there is no explanation.
Magic and God and even zeitgeist, things like this, they're all just ways of saying, ain't got a clue.
Ain't got a clue of a clue of a clue.
Don't know. Don't know, but I want to say I don't know, so we'll call it magic or God or the ineffable will or whatever.
And that's fairly important to understand when people make knowledge claims about God.
And it's important to understand that just because there's been things which people would have thought to be impossible in the past, it does not mean, of course, that it's going to be impossible forever.
And the major or central criteria for these kinds of things, and we've all heard this stuff that's, you know, 640k ought to be enough for everyone or anybody, says Bill Gates in, I don't know, 1985 or something.
And so what? Back then it was.
Back then you were looking at breaking the 64k barrier, so 10 times that memory?
Yeah, that ought to be enough for just about anyone, given the status of the programs at the time, when WordPerfect fit on a 5 1⁄4 floppy.
And I remember writing half a novel without running out of memory.
Yes, that ought to be enough for anyone.
He didn't mean for all time, he just meant relative to what had come before.
So you also hear, oh, I think it's The Onion, and I listened to this show many years ago.
But there's a long speech about the Titanic.
That the Titanic is the greatest and most indestructible metaphor for human hubris that was ever invented.
Because, of course, you always hear this about the Titanic.
They said it was unsinkable!
And then it sank on its very first voyage and therefore every expression of human certainty is invalid.
I mean, that's just really funny.
Horrible, of course, for Leonardo DiCaprio, who spent a year and a half of his life in a holding tank, but it's this kind of stuff you hear all the time.
Flight is impossible, you hear.
Car travel is impossible, because if you go more than 15 miles an hour, you are unable to breathe in an open car or whatever, right?
So you hear all of these Scientific statements, I don't even know if they're by scientists.
I doubt it. I doubt it was a scientist who said the Titanic is unsinkable.
But you can see that people's addictions to these negative statements about human certainty are very powerful.
Very powerful. It's very hard to be certain.
The moment you put yourself out there as being certain of anything, there are two things that occur.
The first is that you get attacked and dismissed as Dogmatic and intolerant and blah blah blah blah, right?
Like we're all supposed to be this loose, pot-bellied brain, flaccidly spreading over every simple bit of credulity that exists in the world.
And we're supposed to believe in the scientific method equally with numerology and astrology, and not have any doubts about the efficacy of the latter.
And then, if we're able to prove, as another post had put recently, if we're able to prove that these things were nonsense, or if we're supposed to ask scientific questions about these things, then what happens?
Well, then we're A bunch of killjoys who are just undermining and destroying everybody's happiness and fun.
Hey, it's fun! Where's the harm?
Don't be such a killjoy! Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Ah, the passive aggression.
So, certainty is something that not only gets you attacked or undermined or criticized or people roll their eyes or it's considered to be a psychological ailment of some kind to have any kind of certainty.
Although, of course, the interesting thing is that people...
Most people have almost no doubt that certainty...
Is a negative state of mind, or a hostile, or undermining, or derogatory, or humiliating, or vain, or whatever.
Pride goeth before a fall.
Almost everybody who has this opinion is very certain of this opinion that certainty is bad.
Which, of course, leads you down that little rabbit hole called self-detonating definitions.
Certainty is bad!
Oh, so that certainty... Anyway, you know where I'm going with this.
So, that's the first thing that happens.
The second thing that happens with certainty is that you start to get into a rather tricky and tangled and convoluted, in some ways, although very clear in other ways, though not pleasant, relationship with your fellow man.
Ah, our fellow man.
Oh, what's the tricky thing, right?
So, at the moment that you do have certainty, and you do understand that there's no possible way that anything as described as God could conceivably exist, and that anyone who asserts anything to the contrary is...
Uninformed, uneducated, or malevolent, or self-interested, which is sort of a combination of the three.
Then you have a tricky relationship with your fellow man, who are constantly making claims and statements of the most absurd kind that can be imagined.
If rationality were oxygen, we would all be blue in the face and expiring in about eight minutes or so.
There are almost no oases in these deserts of irrationality that is really the sum total and content of human society and I count among this even the artistic works which are not primarily philosophical but which attempt to explain or provide some insider revelation into human nature and simply seem to me to be prescriptions or descriptions of madness of one form or another so given that to be certain is to be alienated that to be certain is to be hated or disapproved of in some manner unless you hide it,
you know, like a guilty secret I am married to society, but I have an evil, seductive mistress called Truth and Rationality.
Shh! Don't tell anybody!
Out will come the firebrands, and there will be many pitchforks.
So, it's pleasant, or more pleasant in many ways, to say, well, that's my truth, that's your truth.
I think you're wrong, but I'm not going to push it.
And this, of course, is exactly what...
The bad people of the world feast on, right?
That little decision that says, well, I'm not going to push the whole certainty thing because that's going to bring me directly into conflict with everybody, their brother, their dog and their parakeet, who will form an angry mob and I will be rejected and so on, right?
I mean, irrationality is the virus that has entombed the human mind.
And the way that this virus protects itself is by attacking...
Rationality. Just as you would expect.
We have become, or have always been, I think, and maybe less now than before, corrupted by irrationality.
And it has become the defense mechanism.
Like the cancer within your body will attack the cells that want to attack the cancer.
And that's how you die.
Or if it's some sort of autoimmune deficiency disorder, then Your immune system does not recognize the foreign elements and you get sick from everything.
So, I think we're all pretty aware, deep down in our gut, that if we commit to certainty in a rational and empirical and scientific sense, that we invite attack.
And this is not paranoia.
This is not paranoia at all.
This is a simple fact of being a philosopher.
And it is true throughout history It is true in the modern world, and it will likely be true for some generations to come.
And so I would say, and I don't consider this hesitation any form of cowardice, once it's understood, if you continue to believe in rationality, right?
Because this is where you have to get to as a thinker, as a feeler.
And this is why I say you can't do a little bit of philosophy.
Because you have to make that decision, right?
The decision is sort of simple.
Is rationality, evidence, empiricism, and so on, is the scientific method and logical argument and evidence the way to go to establish truth, or is it just one of several paths to the truth?
Do you have to climb the mountain, or can you will your way up the mountain, or pray that the mountain climbs you, or some such nonsense?
And you kind of have to make that decision, right?
If you've got to get to the top of a mountain, You either sit there and start climbing, or you just sort of wish your way up or whatever, right?
But you kind of have to do one or the other.
or you walk away from the mountain.
But you can't both wish your way up the mountain and climb the mountain simultaneously.
You can, but it's deranged, right?
Because then you're saying, well, I want to wish my way up the mountain, but I'm going to climb anyway.
Well, then clearly you're saying that it's better to climb the mountain than to wish a way up the mountain.
So, when I talk about people who are eyeing this mountain and hearing the thunderclaps of truth that emanate from the top and say, boy, I bet the view from up there is fantastic.
Boy, people, they sound like they're having fun up there.
What a sky party Olympia of the gods is up there among clouds.
And they say, I think I'm going to eye this staircase.
That seems to be leading up to the top of the mountain.
Maybe I'll take a little bit of a way up, maybe I won't, but I'm going to hang around in the vicinity of the mountain and I'm going to try and gain access to the top.
Well, you either climb, you walk away from the mountain, or you sit there and wish your way to the top and get nowhere.
I'm not saying this to anyone in particular, it's just a way of looking at it.
I'll say it again. You either climb You walk away from the mountain or you sit there and wish your way to the top and live a life of futility where you don't even get to go somewhere else other than the mountain.
There is a valley, an oily, slick, smoky, bloody valley with tempting fruits and delectables called social acceptance and conformity with the mad crowd which you can go to.
You can't get there by sitting there wishing your way up the mountain.
Then you're in the worst of both worlds. You kind of have to make that choice.
Now, I, of course, hope that you make the choice to climb, and at least there are stairs.
To some degree, when I got to the mountain, there were no stairs.
At least not stairs that live very far up from where I sit now.
And so, at least there are some stairs, some flares, some guideposts, some arrows, some here be dragons signs, and so on, and don't go into this cave!
But, If you climb, which I think is wonderful, then you have to leave childish things behind.
And you have to leave wishing your way up the mountain behind.
Because you can't say, I'm going to climb the mountain, and then simultaneously say, but you can also wish your way up the mountain.
Because then, climbing the mountain is insane.
Right? If I have to talk to somebody in India, and I'm sitting there staring at a phone, and I say, well...
I can dial India and I can talk to someone.
It takes about 10 seconds.
Or, I can walk to India.
Right? Build a pontoon across the Atlantic.
Or Pacific, I guess you'd go.
Which would take me 20 years.
10 years or whatever, however long it would take.
Now, if I believe that you can phone to India, why would I walk?
Wouldn't it be mad to say, well, I'm walking to India and it's going to take me ten years.
But hey, you know, you can phone too, if you want.
Do you understand how insane that looks?
Once you get that you can't call India, that you can't will your way to the top of the mountain, then you walk.
And you don't have to walk towards India.
You don't have to climb the mountain.
You can wander off somewhere else and go into the low, dank, pleasurable tavern of social acceptance and conformity with the mad crowd.
But... If you say that there's a path to truth, and there really is only one path to truth, there's reason and evidence, then you have to be...
To work on that, you have to be certain of it.
To take that approach, you must be certain.
Otherwise, it's futile, and it's a waste of energy, and it's a waste of time, and you look mad.
Right? You look mad!
If you start walking to India and everyone's on the phone and they think that they're talking to somebody in India and you say, I could use the phone but I'm going to walk, then you look mad and you do an enormous disservice to philosophy and philosophers and the truth and the species and the elevation of the human.
You turn philosophy into madness.
Um... Please don't do that.
It's hard enough as it is to talk to people about the truth.
You walk because nobody is talking to India.
They're just shouting into yogurt cups with string trailing down by their elbow.
You take the hard road of learning about the truth and you don't simultaneously say, Ah, and you, people are all talking to India.
You walk because you know nobody is talking to India.
And if you walk while saying that people can talk to India, then you have just detonated the value of philosophy and turned philosophy into madness.
Into madness. How would you feel if one of your employees came to you and you said, call this guy in India, and he said, I'm going to have to walk.
And you said, well, what do you mean you're going to have to walk?
And he said, well, yeah, I could use the phone, but I'm going to walk because it's better.
Why is it better? Why not pick up the phone?
Well, you know, I just prefer walking.
For me, walking is better.
I think that walking has more value.
You'd be saying, well, you know, you can walk, but not to India because you're fired, you lunatic.
I mean, that's the disservice that we do through things like agnosticism, through things like minarchism.
This is the damage that we do through inconsistency and through lack of certainty.
And I'm not saying the first time you step foot on the mountain or the first step you take towards India, you're automatically certain.
But you have to be certain enough that you can't fly up there in your mind or call on some telephone system.
You have to be at least certain of that.
That's why that first step is a doozy.
The first step towards the truth is a hell of a doozy because you really have to give up If you've spent 10 years at the bottom of the mountain trying to will your way up, trying to fly up in your mind and feeling like a failure and feeling futile, or even worse, imagining that you are on top of the mountain when it only turns out to have been a psychotic break with reality or you ate the wrong mushrooms or something, it's the waiting for the bus syndrome, right?
I mean, if you wait for the bus for 10 minutes, there's no bus coming and you've got a half-hour walk, you say, eh, I'll just walk, maybe.
If you've been waiting for the bus for an hour...
How are you going to feel about walking?
Not that good, right?
Because you could be there by now if you just started walking to begin with.
And this is the trap that people get into with uncertainty and with mysticism and with agnosticism and with minarchism and with statism and so on.
With, I'm going to walk, but hey, maybe people can phone.
I don't think they can phone, but maybe they can't.
Maybe there is a God. Maybe the state can do something good.
Maybe violence can work for some people, somewhere, somehow.
But not for me.
Not for me.
I'm going to walk. Well, it turns your life into futile, bitter, empty ashes.
And this is why the world stays sick, even though there are lots of people who are dedicated to rationality and science, philosophy.
Evidence. Empiricism. Because it takes a hell of a lot of courage.
For me. Maybe other people find it easier.
I don't know. It takes a hell of a lot of courage to say to everyone who thinks they're at the top of the mountain, you're not moving.
And it takes a lot of courage to say to everyone who's yelling down yogurt cups thinking they're talking to people in India to say, those things aren't attached to anything and you're not talking to India to I know we've got to talk to India.
Let's walk. Well, that's a hard thing to do.
People hate you for it.
They attack you for it.
Because India is virtue.
The mountain is virtue.
And everybody thinks they're already there.
And you say, no, you're not there.
You're not even close.
And in fact, thinking that you're there moves you further away from virtue.
Thinking that you pray to God or pass a law or conform to your parents' craziness moves you further and further away from virtue.
So that's why it's so important to keep working in philosophy with the goal of eradicating doubt.
Not doubt in the methodology.
This is a subtle distinction.
Scientists doubt... Absolute conclusions within science.
But they do not doubt the value and the virtue of the scientific method.
A scientist may doubt the validity of his theory or any theory, but he does not doubt that a theory must be logical and conform to reality, predict and accurately record or accurately predict the behavior of matter or energy.
And that kind of certainty is what we need to get to.
I'm certain that there's no God, the same way that I'm certain that there's no square circle, that 2 plus 2 does not equal 5, or green, or a truck, that human beings are not made or green, or a truck, that human beings are not made of both flesh, gas, and fire
that gases expand when heated, that objects attract objects, that mass attracts mass, that Logic is required for theories.
I have no doubt about those things because they're all related.
It's the intro to philosophy argument.
Our mind makes errors and we validate it according to logic which is derived from the senses.
It's that simple. It's that simple.
And yes, you will be walking through the camp of the damned.
Those imagining that they're at the top of the mountain when they're just sitting in the fog and the smoke and the filth at the bottom.
And they will hate you for telling them that they're not at the top of the mountain.
In fact, they're sinking into the mud.
They're getting lower and further.
Because they believe that they're at the top.
And people hate the rationalists.
Now, I mean, at some point things will change, but right now we're a little bit on the cutting edge here.
We're a little bit of the icebreakers over here.
And that's why it's so important to, yeah, absolutely have room for doubt about conclusions, but don't have room for doubt about methodology, because you either walk up the mountain, you walk away from the mountain, or you pretend that you're at the top and wheel your way up.
So, philosophy is either rational, you stop dealing with philosophy, or you're an irrational and corrupt philosopher.
And that's why I have such hostility towards minarchists and those who are the closest to the truth, right?
Some deranged communist or some fundamentalist Christian.
Eh, you know, well, they're just mad, right?
But somebody who says, rationality is important, therefore I'm going to be an agnostic.
You! And I'm not saying this is anyone, not the person who posted or replied or anything like that.
But this is my hostility.
People who accept that the truth and reason and empiricism, science are valid.
And then pull up and stop.
Like libertarians of the monarchist variety.
Violence is evil, but we're going to leave a corner of it.
I think we should all walk to India.
But you can phone if you want.
Who is going to walk?
Who is going to bother walking?
So, I hope that that makes some sense as to why we continually fail, from my view, as a movement.
That we really have to say there is no such thing as phoning to India.
There is no such thing as willing your way up the mountain.
And those who promulgate it turn human life into endless ash.
And we should no longer support them by giving them an out.
And it's very hard. It's very hard to stop giving people an out because that raises the stakes of confrontation quite considerably and can make your life very difficult.
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